Excluded from the female world of adulthood, they form their own society, a Just William club of eternal schoolboys with Gaz's young son Nathan (the engagingly sour-faced William Shape) tagging along as disapproving chaperon. But that's because the men see women from the outside - through the toilet window, as it were. The presence of women in the film seems a little cursory, largely restricted to Lesley Sharp, Emily Woof, a few mouthy passers-by, and the crowds of the club scenes. Their heroes are adolescents who don't understand women but wish they did, and eventually are only too happy to confess their inadequacies. The Full Monty could have been made as course material for film-studies seminars on Marxism and the Phallus.Ĭattaneo and Beaufoy could have gone for a harsher lampooning of male sexual attitudes, but their approach yields subtler, more tender returns. The vision persuades him there's only one way for men to retaliate - reclaim their widgers.

A mortified Gaz sneaks behind enemy lines to witness the ultimate horror - women not only invading the sanctity of the Gents, but pissing standing up. They've even taken over the working men's club for women-only nights. Meanwhile, Sheffield's women are still in work and ruling the roost. Dave worries about losing his wife (Lesley Sharp), Gaz is already divorced, and their suicidal pal Lomper (Steve Huison) is living a dreary celibate life. Fatigued and disenfranchised, they all wonder if they're still men. It's dignity they hope to regain, and more fundamentally, masculinity. What makes the story compelling is that there's more at stake than just the few bob and laughs the lads stand to make. But this is light Loach and with a more focused comic touch. There's a cameo by Bruce Jones from Loach's Raining Stones, as a hapless auditioner gauchely attempting to peel off his anorak. Unemployed Northern men trying anything to scrape a living and uphold their dignity sure enough, The Full Monty pays its respects to Ken Loach. Gaz, realising there's only one way left for a man to make a fast buck, assembles a rival crew - not so much beefcake as meatloaf and scrag end. Then they see some women queuing to see a troupe of male strippers. The men have nothing much else to occupy them, and Gaz is likely to lose touch with his young son unless he can pay his debts. It starts with a brassy, breathlessly chipper documentary clip, a spot-on parody of the old Pathe Films. What The Full Monty is, though, is political, in the gentlest, Ealing-comedy way.

Populated by awkward, well-meaning lads who don't have it in them to behave too badly, its Sheffield is apparently the one part of Britain that Loaded never reached. Rife with nudging and guffawing, Peter Cattaneo 's film about steelworkers turned male strippers is somehow less raunchy, but every bit as jolly and as irreducibly English, as a Donald McGill seaside postcard. It's a comedy about male full-frontal exposure, or, as one character puts it, men prancing around Sheffield with their widgers hanging out. C onsidering its subject matter, The Full Monty comes across as an oddly innocent, sexless film.

Invasion 1997 full movie